The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. As geometry size continues to be scaled down, it is increasingly more difficult for conventional photolithography processes to pattern IC features. Further, smaller geometry sizes lead to other challenging issues, such as pattern uniformity and feature alignment.
Therefore, while existing methods of fabricating semiconductor integrated circuit devices have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in every aspect.